The year of that first meeting was 2002. Inspired and mentored by the Commission
on Law and Aging (Commission) of the American Bar Association (ABA) the
National Elder Section of the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) had just been born
and with it an immediate recognition of a new area of practice and of law in Canada.
The field of Elder Law or Law and Aging, as it was also known, began in earnest.
I explained to Ma?ˆtre L’Heureux-Dubé that from a practice perspective we were
serving older adults and those playing important roles in the lives of older adults:
legal representatives, family, and other professionals. We would develop a framework
for examining and understanding the impact of aging on laws, policies and
practices and in so doing take account of the socio-legal and medico-legal dimensions
of an aging population.
I went on to explain that lawyers had not been at the table, nor were they part of
any multidisciplinary bodies examining these important questions of the day. The
legal aspects of aging formed no part of the study of gerontology, for example. As
lawyers we were particularly equipped to defend legal rights and the important
values of older adults: dignity, the freedom from age discrimination; security,
including financial and workplace security, the promise of a health care system
meeting their needs and protection from abuse and exploitation; and autonomy, the
right to be treated as independent beings, even in the presence of diminished
capacity.